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Crypto Currencies (bitcoin / litecoin / feathercoin etc)

Anyone here play with crypto currency?

In a nutshell, some smart people have figured out that cryptographic algorithms combined with a distributed proof of work scheme to create and store currency is actually a very viable method of commerce not to mention a fun hobby!

If you have spare GPU power (ATI cards only), mining cryptos can be a very interesting pursuit. I've had 3x5850's going flat out for about 6 weeks now.

I don't know a lot of the more technical specifics, but my understanding is that there are two main types of cryptos :

SHA256
- Bitcoin (BTC), the most popular (and most expensive currency). Uses a lot of processing power but requires little memory. Specific FPGA / ASIC chips are being built in massive arrays to mine, overtaking GPU mining.

SCRYPT
Feathercoin (FTC) and many, many others
- Requires more memory as well as processing power. Well suited to GPU processing. My understanding is that the specifically built bitcoin miners do not work well with this method.

I am currently mining BTC and FTC but as more mining systems are built to hash SHA256 the value of the scrypt based coins will rise in my opinion as many people only have access to GPU mining.

There are many tools out there to mine on linux and windows systems. I use cgminer myself for both BTC and FTC.

Anyway, just wanted to see how much interest there was in cryptos on the phoronix community. Anyone who wants a good place to start should check out http://forum.feathercoin.com/ as FTC is one of the more popular alternate coins (anything not BTC is considered an altcoin) though like everything it is not without its criticism. https://bitcointalk.org/ has a lot more info but also a lot more crap to sift through.

My conclusion is that right now there are a lot of speculators throwing money into bitcoins and that the velocity of the money is pretty low which then results in bubble bubble burst up down up down in the value of bitcoins. What do you think?